Pros:

Cons:

It's rarely a good sign when a publisher stealthily ships a game to stores under cover of darkness without any sort of fanfare. One day, poof -- Mage Knight: Apocalypse is on the shelves! It's almost as if Namco hopes no one notices. Unfortunately, after playing the game you can understand why that might be the case, as Mage Knight fails on a variety of levels, from an astonishingly bad camera system to weak animations and an overall incomplete vibe from start to finish.

Mage Knight, licensed after the popular miniatures games from WizKids, is a 3D third-person hack-and-slash action/role-playing game that carries with it similarities to many games, such as Fable, Joan of Arc and Titan Quest. It's basically one fight after another as you gain power and score bigger and better loot along the way. At the start of the game you choose from one of five player characters ranging from a typical human paladin to a female vampire who looks like an S&M dominatrix. The other female character, an Amazon, also has an affinity for fighting with as little clothing on as possible. (Thankfully, the male dwarf is fully clothed.)

Thanks to the non-healing enemies, the game turns into a battle of attrition.

Even though you start off with your chosen character, eventually you'll be playing alongside the other four; the AI controls the others even though you have access to basic commands such as "attack," "follow" and "stop." Here's where things get dicey: There's basically no AI in the game at all. The enemies are bunched into small groups, and they simply rush you on sight while any ranged enemies sit back and pelt you with arrows, spells and so on. The only semblance of a brain that the enemy AI shows is that ranged troops will in fact retreat when they lose too much health. Still, it's a bit unfair to get on the game too much for that; most hack-and-slash games don't bring superior enemy AI to the table, either.

The problem is that your teammates don't listen to you and at times simply wander off by themselves despite repeated attempts to get them to follow you. Worse still, at times they literally stand there doing nothing at all, even as the enemy is hacking them to bits. One example is when fighting alongside the Amazon character: An Orc Warrior was bashing her repeatedly, and she sat there, doing nothing, until given the order to attack. After the Orc died, she shut down again, sitting there motionless as an archer pelted her with arrows. It's simply maddening. The same thing happens when telling them to follow you. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Flip a coin and hope for the best.